Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West

by Nies, Judith

  Stewart moved to Las Vegas with Helen and their four children to fix up the ranch and sell it. Unfortunately for Mr. Stewart, he misjudged the temperament of his Las Vegas neighbors, and when he went to retrieve one of his horses that they had stolen, they shot and killed him. The newly widowed Helen Stewart, already with four children, was pregnant with a fifth. She knew little about ranching and had never wanted to come to Las Vegas in the first place. Yet she was in no position to move.

  At first she stayed to fix up the ranch to sell. Then she discovered she had a talent for business and for managing a ranch. She also had five children to raise. One of the original Mormon buildings was incorporated into her ranch house. She raised cattle, grew vegetables and peaches, and started a vineyard that produced good wine (drought-resistant vines) that many farmers and ranchers in the Las Vegas Valley came to buy. She hired Paiute Indians as workers. When the State Land Act offered land at $1.25 an acre, she bought additional landholdings until the ranch grew to more than twelve hundred acres. Her ranch included the original water source that had irrigated the Mormon agricultural plots. The Las Vegas valley floor had several places where springs came to the surface and was filled with mesquite trees, willows, cottonwoods, and saltgrass. The major springs were known as Big Springs, Middle, and Little. The Stewart Ranch included Big Springs. (One spring was located beneath the lake in front of the Bellagio casino-hotel and formerly watered the golf course for the Dunes resort. Another of the original springs is at the Springs Preserve.)

  In 1901 Helen Stewart sold more than a thousand acres of her ranch—excluding four acres of the family cemetery and another section she gave to her Paiute workers—to the new railroad venture headed by Senator William Clark. Senator Clark of Montana needed a supply depot for the new railroad line that he was building between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles; Las Vegas was a logical depot. It had the key resource he needed: water. With its springs and underground aquifer, Las Vegas had the huge amounts of water needed to supply the steam engines of the era. Clark set up the Las Vegas Land and Water Company and controlled the water from the three artesian springs. But the new residents who came to work on the railroad found that if they drilled down about three hundred feet, they too could strike water.

  Geologically, Las Vegas is located in the Mohave Desert in a south-tilting bowl surrounded by mountains. The bowl held a natural water supply that was fed by mountain snowmelt and stored in a closed basin that did not run off into streams or rivers. Thousands of years of snowmelt poured down from the surrounding mountains and sank through sand, gravel, and rock to collect in underground aquifers, porous rock formations that stored water in the desert. In places where the water was trapped between layers of impermeable rock, it was under pressure, and springs bubbled to the surface through fissures in the rock.

  These permanent artesian springs were a life-giving resource in the middle of the Mohave Desert. The oasis, first pointed out to the Spanish by their Paiute Indian guides, was well marked on the Spanish maps of the 1600s, maps that the Mormon leadership studied carefully. The Spanish named the spot las vegas, “the meadows,” because of the green vegetation that sprang up in the gray-beige desert. It was a life-saving watering hole in the desert and a crucial stop for any pioneer party on the trail to Southern California.

  Only seven years after arriving in Salt Lake City, Brigham Young sent thirty Mormon families on a mission to settle the Meadows. The Paiute Indians who had used the waters for eons were alarmed by this group of settlers who did not move on. They were used to the Spanish priests going to their missions in California, followed by various wagon trains that passed through, staying at the oasis for days or even weeks, then heading north to Red Rock Canyon along the Old Spanish Trail. But this new group built houses and a wall. They were still there after an entire year and then two years. In response to the worsening relations with the Indians, the Mormons surrounded the cabins, kitchen gardens, and the creek with an adobe wall.

  Summer heat, Paiute incursions, and the alkali soil that produced stunted crops brought an end to the Mormon settlement. Brigham Young had overburdened the small mission with a party of miners he sent to look for minerals in the surrounding mountains. The miners overtaxed the food supply. Some of the Mormon settlers didn’t return all the way to Salt Lake and settled in what would become Mesquite at the Nevada-Utah border or St. George, Utah.

  Although the original Las Vegas settlement was a colony that lasted less than two years in the mid-1850s, the always-industrious Mormon settlers remembered their early history in Las Vegas, and many came back to work on the railroad.

  Like many of the early railroad ventures, the big profits came not from running the railroad itself, but from land sales and town sites located along the routes and from controlling water rights. The Salt Lake, San Pedro, and Los Angeles Railroad was no exception. Senator Clark’s partner in the venture was Senator Kearns of Utah, owner of the Silver King mine in Park City, Utah.

  Senator Clark had a name for being a dishonest businessman. His unsavory reputation derived from documented accounts that he had bribed Montana state legislators to appoint him senator; the profusion of legal suits brought by former business partners who accused him, with good evidence, of cheating them out of profits; and his marriage to a teenager forty years his junior who had been a ward in his home. Senator Clark was from Butte, Montana, and had made his first fortune in copper smelters.

  Mark Twain, who first came to Nevada in 1861 when his brother was appointed secretary to the governor of Nevada Territory, later wrote about Senator Clark and judged him to be considerably worse than the average Gilded Age robber baron: “He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary.” Although Clark County, which includes most of southern Nevada, is named for the dodgy senator, there is no statue of this Las Vegas founding father anywhere to be seen. There is, however, a statue of Helen Stewart at Springs Preserve Park, a local park that preserves early Las Vegas history, both natural and man-made.

  One day I asked the concierge at Treasure Island hotel-casino, where I was staying, for directions to the Nevada State History Museum. She twirled a Rolodex as big as a basketball several times and shook her head. I asked how come she couldn’t find a state history museum. “No one has ever asked before,” she told me.

  “How about the Mormon Fort? I know that’s not so far from here. Maybe they can tell me where the museum is.” She gave a few more twirls of the Rolodex and came up with the address of the Mormon Fort. “No one has ever asked me for that either,” she said.

  When I finally got to the Mormon Fort, it was noon in June, and I tried to imagine the pioneer women living in those tiny cabins in summer temperatures, raising children, growing vegetables, and cooking in the summer heat. No wonder they all packed up and headed back to the border, I thought.

  LAS VEGAS HISTORY

  History is not a big subject in Las Vegas. As a rule, the hotels don’t like visitors leaving the gambling center. The casino owners, who make up the most powerful lobby in the state, don’t like the idea of historical tourism. Except for the Atomic History Museum, which is in the middle of the gambling district, museums are hard to find. I realized this only after I found that all the maps I could easily get at the hotel stopped at the outer edge of the old downtown. I had to go to the American Automobile Association office to get maps of Greater Las Vegas.

  Today Las Vegas has fourteen of the largest hotels in the world, many with more than four thousand rooms, several designed by world-famous architects. It has dazzling light displays, themed casinos, big-name entertainment, Broadway shows, and celebrity-chef restaurants. Most of these, however, are not within the Las Vegas city limits. They are outside the city line, because the town-site survey set up by Senator Clark stopped at the north end of the Strip. The Strip is actually on what was called the Old Lo
s Angeles Road in an area called Paradise. Clark County, however, named for Senator Clark, comprises most of southern Nevada. Two-thirds of the Nevada population now lives in southern Nevada. Sixteen of the twenty largest employers in the state are located in Clark County.

  Senator William Clark’s railroad dominated the future growth of Las Vegas because it controlled the water supply and jobs. Photographs of the town from the 1920s show a Spanish mission–style railroad depot (now torn down but located roughly behind the Plaza Hotel), extensive freight yards, butterfly sheds, an ice plant, a handful of stores, and the Arizona Club—which was a restaurant, bar, brothel, and hotel. Some streets have stucco houses with wide porches, others rows of small bungalows built for railroad workers, and many streets are interrupted by patchwork lots of scrub and desert. Until 1930 Fremont Street was the town’s only paved street.

  Many Mormons moved into Las Vegas to work on the railroad or to explore mining claims or to ranch or farm. A Church of Latter-day Saints was built at the outer edge of downtown. Then in 1921 a torrential summer rainstorm washed out a hundred miles of track. The railroad had to shut down. When the track was rebuilt, the railroad was under control of a new owner, E. H. Harriman’s Union Pacific, and Las Vegas was no longer the supply depot. The new depot was 150 miles to the north, in Caliente, Nevada. The railroad prosperity had lasted barely fifteen years. Southern Nevada became known as “the empty quarter.” The town settled back into desert torpor.

  When Warren Bechtel came to Las Vegas in 1930 to scout the location where he and his partners were about to build a dam, thirty miles south, on the Colorado River, the town had fewer than 4,000 people. In 1922 Nevada, with a total population of 80,000, had been the first state to sign the Colorado River Compact, an agreement that divided the waters of the Colorado River among seven states and Mexico. At the time it was considered a coup that Nevada got 300,000 acre-feet* of water from the compact because of the state’s sparse population. (California had 3.4 million people.) The dam would mostly benefit California, although Nevada and Las Vegas would get much-needed electricity from the dam’s hydroelectric plant. Arizona refused to sign.

  A DAMN BIG DAM

  Although the Bechtel Corporation would emerge as the named builder of Hoover Dam, and still highlights the dam as the signature megaproject on its website, at the time it was two Mormon brothers from Ogden, Utah, who actually spearheaded the project. Edmund, known as “E. O.,” and William “W. H.” Wattis were the heads of Utah Construction, the largest construction company west of the Mississippi. The two brothers began by grading railroad bed in Canada at the turn of the century and grew into a major construction company, interrupted by intervals of sheep ranching when there was little railroad work. Within a decade they became the major builder for the Union Pacific Railroad and expanded into dam building, including the dam that created the controversial Hetch Hetchy Reservoir north of San Francisco. They subcontracted tunneling, grading, and laying track to many other construction companies in the West and knew everybody in the business. They liked Warren Bechtel and gave his W. A. Bechtel Company a lot of business, but like many Mormons, the Wattis brothers preferred doing business “with their own kind,” that is, with other Mormons.

  Their preferred partners for bidding on the Hoover Dam project were Harry Morrison and Morris Knudsen of Boise, Idaho—former Bureau of Reclamation engineers, frequent partners with Utah Construction, and fellow Mormons. Bidding construction jobs was an art form in itself. As the saying went, “Estimate too high and you lose the job; estimate too low and you lose your shirt.” Morrison and Knudsen had recently hired Frank Crowe, a legendary dam builder from the Bureau of Reclamation, to help them with the bid. Crowe had done the government’s estimates for what was then called Boulder Dam. (Its original location was to have been in Boulder Canyon, twenty miles upstream, but the site was moved to Black Canyon because of accessible bedrock, a wide wash at the mouth of the canyon, and its proximity to rail lines in Las Vegas. Habit and inertia kept its name as the Boulder Canyon Project, until 1950, when President Truman renamed the dam for President Herbert Hoover, who negotiated the distribution of the river’s water among seven states and under whose presidency the dam was bid and construction begun.)

  Crowe was their best insurance that their bid would both get them the job and make them a profit. The Wattis brothers’ intent was to bid the job with only Morrison and Knudsen as partners, but one member of their board, Marriner Eccles, insisted that the job was too big, the insurance bond of $5 million too large, and the risks too great. He insisted they needed to bring in more partners to spread the risk. Eccles didn’t need to mention age and disease. William Wattis, age seventy-two, was ill with cancer, irritable, and hard to convince. Edmund, age seventy-six, had Parkinson’s disease and was hardly more amenable. They were testy, tough, obstinate, and described by one person who had been on the losing end of a negotiation as “mean as snakes.” (Neither man lived to see the completion of the dam.) The outspoken board member of Utah Construction, the remarkable Marriner Eccles, age thirty-eight, was the son of David Eccles, the wealthiest Mormon in Utah and the person who tithed the most to the Mormon Church. Eccles Sr., Utah’s leading industrialist and banker, had amassed controlling investments in mining, lumber, and land throughout the West.

  Eccles Sr. had two families by two wives, the first with thirteen children, the second with nine. Marriner came from the second family, and when David Eccles died suddenly without a will, the sons of the first family, according to Utah state law, got 70 percent control of seventeen corporations, dealing in lumber, sugar, railroads, construction, and banking. They proved to be untalented stewards. Their younger half-brother Marriner had inherited his father’s genius for business and soon leveraged his 30 percent share into a division of the Eccles holdings that left him with controlling interest in the Eccles banks and a seat on the board of Utah Construction.

  In the end, however, young Marriner Eccles’s views prevailed because the $5 million bond that had to accompany each bid was too large for the Wattis brothers to raise alone, even with Morrison and Knudsen. They began looking for additional partners with financial depth and experience in diversion tunnels, waterline construction, road building, and reinforced concrete. The dam project on the Colorado River had been in the works for more than fifteen years, budgeted at $50 million, and was the largest civil engineering project in US history. It would also be the first dam on any major river in the world. (The hydroelectric plant was budgeted at another $50 million and bid separately from the dam.) In February 1931 all six principals along with their lawyers and bankers met at the Engineers Club in San Francisco to work out the contractual details of their partnership. Marriner Eccles represented the Wattis brothers. (Four years later Franklin Roosevelt appointed Eccles chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, a post he held until 1948, concurrent with his role as president of Utah Construction.) The partners named their consortium Six Companies, after the Six Tongs of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Every partner had to put in between $500,000 to $1 million of his own money to be held as insurance. It was not a consortium that inspired confidence in the insurance company that wrote their $5 million insurance bond.

  Charlie Shea of Shea Construction, an Oregon company that laid out San Francisco’s water-supply system, was using the San Francisco Palace Hotel as his business address; Alan MacDonald of MacDonald Kahn of San Francisco, builder of sewers, storm drains, and the Mark Hopkins Hotel, was known to have been fired from a dozen jobs before starting his own company; Pacific Bridge of Portland, Oregon, with a specialty in underwater construction, was known to be having trouble meeting its cash obligations; E. O. and W. H. Wattis had to include twenty-five thousand cattle and thirty thousand sheep in their list of assets in order to meet their percentage of the insurance bond; and Warren Bechtel and Henry Kaiser, who had paired with Warren Construction of Boston, had to step up and cover the Warren share when the Warren brothers dropped out at the last minute. With $1.5 m
illion invested, Bechtel and Kaiser were the largest investors in Six Companies.

  When the bids were opened in March 1931, Six Companies had the lowest bid, almost exactly, thanks to Frank Crowe, the government’s own estimate. They were $5 million lower than the next competitor and only $24,000 higher than the government’s number. On the day of the announcement in March 1931, reporters and photographers went to William Wattis’s hospital room at the St. Francis Hospital in San Francisco, where he was being treated for cancer. “Now this dam is just a dam, but it is a damn big dam,” he told them with a smile. Downplaying the difficulty of the project, he said, “Otherwise it is no different than others we’ve thrown up in a dozen places.” Many people thought the partners would go broke, but when the dam was completed in 1935, two years and three months ahead of schedule, every partner became a multimillionaire. Even in the middle of the Depression, each partner earned an extra $3 million in profits ($50 million in current dollars). William Wattis died in September of the same year, never having visited the dam site. His brother died in 1934, before the dam was finished.

  The same month as the award announcement, on March 19, 1931, the Nevada Legislature passed a bill that legalized gambling, making Nevada the first and only state in the country where gambling was legal. The same year brought two men to Las Vegas who gave a hint of the future. One was Warren Bechtel, senior partner in Bechtel Construction; the other was Tony Cornero, a Los Angeles bootlegger who, with a nice sense of history, planned to build a classy hotel-casino nightclub called the Meadows. In future decades, Warren Bechtel’s company would become a global corporation and dusty Las Vegas would become the gambling and entertainment capital of the world.